We started the day with South Hill Shines! Some students shared their artwork (self-portraits) with the school. Others were in the drum corps that plays during transitions. We enjoyed the performances of 2nd graders, third graders and individual book talk students.
The whiteboard portion of our Eno board was put into place last night, so we now have a surface on which to write. The projector part may not be ready for another two weeks. We had an extended Math Olympiad/problem-solving session in Math today. Esperanza Rising is the new book we are reading. We learned about conditions in Mexico and California during the Great Depression, which is the setting for the book. We enjoyed the poetic language of the first chapter of the book. During K buddies today, we read, drew and built structures with our buddies. We
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When Ms. Belle came in to Music this morning, students were playing a game with a basketball and an inflatable basketball hoop. They had a chant that was syncopated (which means off-beat)
For Math today, we heard the story of the Numerator and Denominator twins, who want to be treated equally, always when they are equivalent. Change one by dividing by 3, and the other demands the same treatment. Also, Ms. Belle is just a "simple gal", who likes simple fractions as answers to problems. We worked very hard for an hour on our UDHR assessment. In the afternoon, we w . In PE we are continuing to work on our circus unit. We were juggling, and then did a free play with circus equipment.
In Math we made fraction strips and used them to make number lines. We made equivalent fractions with area models and multiplication. In extra time, many of us worked on our blog posts. Our time in the computer lab included time to do research about authors or time periods for our book jacket project. We could also use the time to do research for our blog. Mrs. Vann posted passwords for the databases from the library website. Kids should put this into their backpacks. After lunch, we had a lovely silent reading time. We also watched another section of the movie "What's on Your Plate?? about nutrition and food systems. Tomorrow is our Human Rights exam. Vocabulary cards are due. 2 days until the book jacket We did circus skills in PE this morning.
In Math we had clinics to follow up on our Friday exam. We worked on fix-ups in our Math books as well. It was Ms. Jen's last day. We know she'll do a great job in her next student teaching job. We connected our Nepal article to the UDHR articles. We worked very well in small groups. We will have an essay test on Thursday. We will read a similar article, and students will need to make the connections between another firsthand account of rights being withheld and the articles of the UDHR. Tonight students are bringing home a sheet to list some ideas that they can blog about over the next few months. We will be switching to writing blogs in class during the 7:40 to 8::10 time and during our Extra Time instead of doing DOL and writing prompts. This paper should stay in the children's organizer so they can refer to the assignment and to their ideas if they get stuck. The particulars of the assignment (ie. do it on a word processor and spell check before copying into the blog) are listed under ELA > Writing> Blogging, as well as some links for ideas about what to blog about and some links to exemplary student blogs. At the end of the day we started a "Mad-Lib" like activity to tell what we ate and did on Sunday, and to think about what changes we could make, if any, to be even healthier. Tomorrow there will be a sub In Music we played with frogs. They were wooden percussion instruments.
We had a long but fair Math test. We got two brain breaks after that. for Human Rights we read about people in Nepal who weren't allowed to open schools in their village. We have homework finding vocabulary in the article and making flash cards from it. To end the day, we explored another nutrition food-choice game. Homework is to write 2 paragraphs: one describing the game and whether it is a good activity to learn about nutrition, and another paragraph comparing this game to the one we tried last week. The links to both games are on Edmodo. Students brought home report cards today. They are invited to come to their conference for part or all of the time. We have 8 days until the first due date for our book project. Mr. K said we were awesome in PE. We played scooter hockey.
We cleaned out our desks and used our new bamboo chamois cloths. In Math we had clinics in Order of Operations and division. In the library computer lab, we did Imagine Learning and read each other's blogs and made comments. Tomorrow, we have a new student coming. She came to meet Ms. Belle and got a tour of the school. We are excited to greet her. Welcome! We had a great work session finishing our posters for Human Rights. We continued our learning about processed food and how it hurts o Math test tomorrow! Sometimes the day after a break is calm and slow. Today wasn't so great. Tomorrow will be better.
Today we worked on a review for Thursday's Math test, which will cover order of operations, multiplying by a two digit number, dividing by a two digit divisor, and problems to solve with bar modeling. We will continue our review tomorrow. For our Human Rights lesson, we grappled with some of our vocabulary by sorting our flash cards out and explaining relationships between the words. Then we got a copy of a plain language version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which we compared to the original. Depending on the article, some of us preferred the old document to the one that was rewritten to be simpler. In Health today, we talked about processed food. We worked in jigsaw groups to learn about foods that were whole foods, had some processing and were highly processed. For example, there was in information card for corn, canned corn, and frosted corn cereal. We discovered that the more processed the food is, the less healthy it is for humans, and the more damaging it is to the environment. Tomorrow we'll think of ways we can switch out to eat some less processed food in our diets. No spelling or vocabulary this week. It is just too short! More division with two digit divisors! We worked today to check our work by multiplying the divisor and the quotient (then adding a remainder if there is one) to get the dividend. We made up the rule: multiply Santa by Gramma and get the toys in the house. See if your child can explain that!
We dug further into the UDHR today, with children becoming experts on different articles of the document. We have been looking at difficult language, summarizing the paragraphs, and visualizing what the world would look like if each article were upheld and what it would look like if that promise was not being kept. Students then met with other groups to teach the points which they had studied and to learn about the others from their classmates. They were impressive! Our class has been sharing many stories of relatives who are veterans or serving in the military. We took the time today to learn a bit about the branches of the military and to watch a video about the history and principles of Veterans' Day. Children got paper to make cards to thank veterans for their service as a Veterans' Day project. Tomorrow, Ms. Belle will be out of class. The students pledged to do their best to be respectful and focused for the sub. Our writing prompt this morning was to write about a crazy-looking root vegetable called "celeriac" which looks kind of like a brain! The class was challenged to find out what kind of recipes it can be used in. We had PE this morning.During Math,, Ms Belle had a meeting, so there was a guest teacher. She still taught us though, because she had recorded a screen-casting of the lesson on her iPod, which we watched at the beginning of the lesson. It was more double-digit divisors, so we worked hard at long division again. Yesterday was a good day. We didn't have a blog post because there was a guest teacher at the end of the day while Ms. Belle was at a meeting.
Today we went to Art where we looked at masks on the projector and actual masks as well. We planned our own masks. In Math, we worked on using the traditional way to divide a number by a two digit divisor. Ms. Belle used some of the bells and whistles on the Eno board to cover up numbers and to do the lesson. We performed tableaus during our Human Rights study and guessed each other's words. We also took a quiz about Human Rights and used the words to write what we know. After lunch - what a treat- we got to read our own books! We discussed Nutrition and talked about the game we played yesterday. |
AuthorThis blog has (almost) daily posts about our shenanigans and hard work. We post together at the end of the school day. Archives
June 2014
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